Chuck versus Mom
by a-delacroix
Summary: **Complete** My vision of Chuck's first encounter with his Mom. Spoilers for Season 4.
1. Chapter 1

8/2/10

Chuck versus Mom

It had been a hard three weeks of digging through the seemingly endless boxes of minutiae his father had accumulated during twenty years in the spy business, but Chuck had finally found the lead to his mother's location. However when he had arrived, the facility had been stripped bare. It had then taken revealing his quest to Sarah and Casey to shake loose a new lead.

And it had all led to this warehouse deep in the district backing onto the Long Beach docks. It had been nearly impossible to keep the last couple of clues secret from Sarah, but this initial contact was something he had to do alone. Oh, he had considered bringing Ellie, as she had as much right to be here as he, but some of the things he had learned along the twisting trail had suggested possible danger and he had sworn to his father to protect her.

But now, as he made his way through the dark, shadowy building, he began to question his resolve. Perhaps he should have brought some backup.

Finally, after five minutes of steadily building trepidation, Chuck reached the door leading into the office area. He paused for a moment before opening the door. He had last seen his barely remembered mother when he had been four. Ellie had been seven when she had walked away from them, so she had a few memories, but all he had was an old faded photo. She had looked so young and beautiful; he had long fantasized about this moment. How would she look after twenty-five years?

If there was one thing he had learned from his years working with Casey, it was that procrastinating in situations like this only made matters worse. Therefore with one last deep breath, Chuck grabbed the doorknob and briskly pulled the door open.

The blast of air that hit him in the face felt surprisingly frigid after the sweltering summer California heat of the un-air conditioned warehouse. His shirt suddenly felt clammy but he wasn't sure if it was due to the temperature change or the situation. But then this trivial matter was swept from his thoughts as he spotted her. She was sitting at a desk facing away from him and towards a row of windows overlooking the distant harbor.

"Mom?" he asked in a tone he suddenly realized was little more than a whisper. He was just about to repeat himself when she turned.

Quickly, she rose from the chair and he realized she was cradling in her arms a BFG straight from some videogame.

"Mom?" he repeated, as more than a hint of uncertainty crept into his voice.

"Chuck, it is time for your training to begin. Judgment Day is nearly here."

"Judgment Day?" echoed Chuck.

[The screen fades to black as the Terminator theme begins to blare.]

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Author's Note

With the casting of Linda Hamilton as Chuck's Mom, I felt the need to do my personal vision of their first meeting.

Have a great day,

Duane

P.S. I don't own Chuck or the Terminator franchise.


	2. Chapter 2

8/3/10

Chuck versus Mom

Chapter 2

Chuck jerked awake.

His heart was pounding and he was covered in sweat. He reached a hand out and touched Sarah's bare shoulder to reassure himself he was in his bed. She shifted slightly, but didn't awaken.

It had been just a dream. Or based on how he felt at this moment, it definitely qualified as a nightmare.

Slowly and quietly he slid out of the bed and padded into the bathroom. He carefully pushed the door closed before switching on the overhead light. When the room lit up he found himself staring at his reflection in the mirror. Other than a sheen of sweat, he looked exactly the same as he always did. Then he glanced over at the hand-painted ceramic clock Sarah had purchased in a small shop during their last trip to Santa Barbara. 1:15 AM, he had been asleep barely an hour.

Turning back to the mirror, he stared at his reflection as he pondered the dream. It had been one of those super-vivid ones that felt absolutely real while he was experiencing it, yet now that he was awake, it was quickly fading.

It had to be his subconscious mind trying to deal with the upcoming meeting with his mother. It wasn't until the 'only view after my death' video from his father had appeared on his computer that he had begun considering tracking his mother down. She had abandoned them so long ago, she no longer felt real or important enough to their lives to bother to pursue. But after the video message where his father had admitted to having been a spy for over twenty years, he had begun wondering about his mother. Perhaps she, too, had been a spy and her long ago departure hadn't been by her choice. And once that hint of doubt had taken root in his mind, he had to resolve it before he went crazy.

But now that he had found where she was hiding and he was only hours away from getting the answers he had been searching for, he experienced this dream. What did it mean? And now it had faded to where all he clearly remembered were two words – Judgment Day.

But who or what was being judged? Oh, he got the biblical reference to the final day when all the dead would be raised up and they would be judged for their sins. But the theological meaning didn't feel quite right.

So that seemed to leave a personal meaning. Was Judgment Day about his mother judging him when they met or he judging her? He had no idea about the latter beyond his natural bias to blame her for leaving him and Ellie when they were just children. But on the former, his mother judging him, he didn't feel the qualms he would have felt several years earlier. He had moved passed the whole dead end job at the BuyMore and now had a beautiful, bright girlfriend in Sarah. His life was coming together and he had nothing to be ashamed of.

Chuck stood there staring blankly into the mirror lost in reverie for another ten minutes before he felt calm enough to go back to bed. Tomorrow was going to be a big day and he was going to need his rest.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Chuck stood before the closed door to the office in the back of the warehouse and couldn't shake the overwhelming sense of déjà vu. Oh, the layout of the warehouse hadn't been exactly the same as the one he vaguely remembered from his nightmare, but it was close enough. And now he stood at a white door with a nearly identical 'Private' sign hanging in the center.

"Don't freak yourself out," he whispered to calm himself. It had all been a harmless nightmare and he couldn't let it color this first encounter.

Still, he couldn't fully quash the sense of trepidation he felt as he turned the door's handle.

Stepping through the door, he was almost relieved to see a blank wall on the other side of the room rather than the wall of windows from the dream. And rather than a spotlessly clean desk, the one on the far side of this room was stacked high with papers and the computer at its center was a virtual antique sporting a seventeen inch CRT that looked both tiny and big at the same time.

But one thing was the same as the dream, the woman sat in the desk chair with her back to him.

"Mom?" he said. And the tone of his own voice threatened to suck him back into the nightmare.

The woman stood and began to turn. She was short by his standards maybe five foot four at most. And she had light brown hair similar to his father. For a second he wondered how both he and Ellie had ended up as tall brunettes when both their parents were so much shorter with fair hair.

But then he cringed. His mother was once again holding a BFG similar to the one in the nightmare, but this time it was pointed directly at him. And then he saw the homicidal rage illuminating her face.

"You shouldn't have come here, you fucking machine!" She screamed. "Don't you think I realized from the moment you downloaded the Intersect that you had killed my son and taken his place? No human mind could hold the Intersect - only one of your filthy Skynet-developed neural networks could contain that much information. And now you're going to pay for what you have done!"

And before he could even understand what she meant when she called him a machine, she pulled the trigger and the weapon flashed. The massive projectile smashed into his chest and slammed his body five feet back until he hit the wall. Unbelievable pain flared out from his chest until it seemed to scorch through every part of his body.

But suddenly he felt detached from his body and its pain and watched with almost a feeling of curiosity has his vision filled with charts and text and graphs all in a bright neon red. They seemed to be trying to tell him about the damage his systems had sustained, but his attention was focused passed them on the woman. His sight was filling with static like some old analog TV as she approached and as his body slid steadily down the wall until he was in a sitting position with his legs splayed out helplessly before him.

"You shouldn't have killed my son," he seemed to hear her whisper as the barrel of the weapon approached his face until it filled his whole field of view.

A red 'Backup battery online in four seconds' was flashing across his vision when the weapon flared a second time from a distance of barely six inches.

His vision abruptly dwindled to a single red flashing rectangle. The flashing slowed and faded.

FLASH. . . . . .Flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . flash. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

End of Chapter 2

Author's Note

Originally this was going to be just a quick one-shot. But then after I posted it, a couple more chapters popped fully formed into my head. So this is probably going to end up being three or four short (at least by my normal standards) chapters before it is done.

Have a great day,

Duane


	3. Chapter 3

8/4/10

Chuck versus Mom

Chapter 3

Chuck jerked awake and found himself sitting bolt upright in bed.

"What's the matter?" asked Sarah coming awake instantly and hitting the light switch. Then when she lightly rested her hand on his shoulder and felt his clammy skin and the way his whole body was shaking, she asked again in a much more concerned tone, "Chuck, what is the matter?"

For nearly thirty seconds Chuck didn't respond as he remained trapped in the lingering aftereffects of the nightmare. And it seemed more bizarre than any dream he could ever remember, even more bizarre than any dream he had ever heard of. Who dreamed they were some kind of robot covered in human flesh? And then that their Mother had killed them? Oh, others had probably dreamed of their Mother's killing them, but who dreamed of being a machine?

"Really bad nightmare," said Chuck finally.

"Do you want to talk about it?"

Chuck shrugged, but then almost immediately began speaking. "It was the weirdest thing. Okay, you know how I have been searching for my Mother? In the nightmare I had found her and was at my first meeting with her. And then it turned strange. My Mom was yelling and screaming that I wasn't her son, but some robot sent to replace him. Then she used this really big, almost monstrous rifle thing to shoot me in the chest. And as I collapsed to the floor dying, it suddenly was true. I was seeing all these readouts in my head giving status for the various mechanical systems inside my body.

"But the truly weird part was that it all felt so real. It even began with me waking from another nightmare, which is probably why it felt so real," said Chuck, finally winding down as he realized he was beginning to repeat himself.

"A dream within a dream," mused Sarah. "From the psych classes the Agency required me to take, that's very rare."

"A dream within a dream," repeated Chuck. Then he sharply exclaimed, "Damn!"

"What is it?" asked Sarah, as she moved around behind him and began kneading his shoulders.

"Oh, I think I suddenly understand the cause of the dream," stated Chuck.

Sarah paused with her hands resting lightly on his shoulders as she waited for him to continue.

"Since you had the seminar this evening, Morgan and I went to the movies and watched 'Inception', the one about dreams within dreams, twice, back-to-back. Then on our way home, we stopped and had a pizza with anchovies."

"Chuck," began Sarah, now relaxing a little and starting to work on his tense neck muscles again. "You know you always have bad dreams after eating anchovies. Whatever possessed you to do that?"

Chuck felt his body start to relax, a little, as the realization sank in of how simple the explanation for the whole situation was. "You know how it is. Sometimes when Morgan and I are out together, it is like we are fifteen again and I just can't help myself from doing idiotic things."

Sarah was just about to kiddingly chide him over his juvenile behavior when they were interrupted by a loud crash out in the apartment's hallway. It was immediately followed by a high pitched scream that had to be Morgan. And then the scream was abruptly cut off by a loud guttural bark she immediately recognized to be an automatic weapon – something bigger and heavier than an M-16.

Sarah gave Chuck a surprisingly hard shove to the back, but she was a strong, athletic girl and her adrenaline had immediately kicked into overdrive. As Chuck tumbled off the end of the bed, she was already diving for her Glock which was in its customary place under her pillow.

Chuck had just righted himself with his head sticking up barely over the edge of the bed when the door leading to the hallway came crashing into the room. And following it into the room was a monster. Oh, not a huge monster, rather a petite monster, but a monster all the same.

And the monstrous part was that it was wearing the face of his Mother - the youthful face from the lone photo Chuck possessed of her. The one where she had been sitting in the open Jeep with a large German Shepard in the seat beside her.

No, the monstrous part was when she turned so he could see the right half of her face. At first glance she could almost pass for human. But then Chuck got a look at the right half of her face. Large chunks of her hair and skin were missing and a chrome-plated skull showed through. And where her right eye should have been, there was instead some kind of camera device lit by an eerier inner red glow.

Sarah must have realized this creature, this thing, was no human being for she instantly opened up on it with her weapon. And as Chuck spared a glance in her direction, he realized Sarah looked like a mythical lioness protecting her mate - from her mane of golden hair to the intent, determined expression on her face, to her momentarily forgotten gloriously naked body.

Then Chuck's attention was drawn back to the mother-monster. She was wearing a white tank top tee and gray sweat pants and they immediately began to display blossoms of red as Sarah's rounds hit home.

But the rounds didn't knock her down; they merely rocked her back on her heels briefly. Then she raised her right arm from where it had been hanging half-hidden or at least half-hidden from Chuck's angle. For he immediately understood from her position up on the bed Sarah would have seen it from the moment the monster had entered the room and that was probably a large part of the reason she had opened fire as quickly as she had.

For the arm was not human, but some skeletal construction of rods and linkages, pulleys and actuators. And it wasn't bright, shiny metallic. No, it was liberally coated with blood and gore. And that was when he realized it was a creature just like he had been in his nightmare. It was a robot sheathed in human skin. And it suddenly felt like Chuck was trapped back in almost the same nightmare again.

But before Chuck had time to comprehend any more of what this meant, the mother-monster had finished raising its right arm and he saw the BFG clenched in the skeletal metallic hand. He wanted to shout to draw its attention away from Sarah, but it was too late. The metal finger closed on the trigger and a wave of murderous projectiles raced across the eight feet separating it from Sarah.

The bullets punched into and through Sarah's naked body. They slammed her off the side of the bed and into the bright yellow wall. She fell limply to the floor leaving a series of long red streaks on the once pristine surface.

Chuck stared in shock at her body. She had been hit at least half a dozen times and was definitely dead before she had even reached the floor. Sarah was dead. They had been through so many dangerous, life threatening situations and then it all ends like this. And it had happened so unexpectedly and quick. He never thought it would happen or at least that they would have a chance to say a final goodbye.

He was still staring at Sarah as the killer robot that pretended to be human moved closer. Suddenly, it was looming over him and he was forced to look up.

"Mommy's home," it exclaimed with an attempt at an evil grin. But with most of the right side of its face missing, it didn't have the intended impact. No, Chuck was mostly numb and falling into shock and the only thing that struck him was the absurdity of pearl white teeth embedded into the chrome-plated jaw.

Then as the metallic hand once again lifted the BFG, Chuck found himself chanting in his head, 'Let this be a dream. Let this be a dream. Let this be a dream.' Because this couldn't be real, they weren't supposed to die like this.

But as he heard the faint whir of actuators and pulleys tightening the finger on the trigger, his thoughts went back to Sarah. At least, he thought, as the hammer clicked down on the chambered round, Sarah and he would soon be together again.

Let this be a dream, he thought one last time before being swallowed by darkness.

End of Chapter 3


	4. Chapter 4

8/5/2010

Chuck versus Mom

Chapter 4

"Chuck, wake up. Chuck, please wake up."

Slowly, Chuck began to come awake. Then suddenly he remembered the nightmares. His eyes shot open and he tried to jerk erect, but a cool hand was pressing down against his forehead.

"Relax, Chuck, everything is going to be okay."

Focusing on the voice, he looked up at the head hovering above him. It was backlit by the overhead lights which made it seem like it was surrounded by some angelic halo. But the backlighting also made the face somewhat difficult to decypher. And when it did finally resolve, he couldn't suppress a gasp. It was the one constant across all the nightmares he could remember. It was the face of his long departed Mother.

Then more tidbits from the dreams came back and he realized there had been one other constant – the BFG. Frantically, his eyes darted passed his mother and around the rest of the room, or at least as much of it as he could see from his prone position on the floor. The weapon was nowhere in sight. He started to relax just a little until he recognized where he was. He was in the office at the back of the warehouse which had figured prominently in several of the nightmares.

"Chuck, you're going to be okay. You just experienced a very bad 'flash', but I think I have it under control now."

Chuck's gaze returned to his mother's face and suddenly he realized she looked surprisingly like Sarah Connor from Terminator. The movie version Sarah Connor, not the TV version. Oh, she looked at least twenty years older, but there were striking similarities in the shape of the eyes, the fullness of the lips, and the height of the cheekbones.

And that's when it struck him – the dreams had all been stolen snippets from the various movies. Judgment Day. Robots hidden under human flesh. Machines not realizing they were machines. The photo of Sarah with the German Shepard from the end of the first movie. Why hadn't he made the connection to the Terminator movies? But then that was the way of dreams, some key bit was missing and you never realized it.

Still the dreams were hard to shake, particularly the last one. And therefore he asked the most important question, more important than where he was or what had happened to him.

"Sarah?"

His mother smiled and it was something he realized none of the dream versions of her had ever done.

"I called her as soon as you collapsed. She should be here any minute."

Just then the door to the office opened and Sarah came rushing in. Quickly, she knelt next to Chuck on the opposite side from his Mother.

"Chuck, are you okay?"

For a moment Chuck felt a wave of déjà vu from the most recent dream. Sarah had used almost the exact same words when he had seemed to jerk awake from the previous dream within a dream. For a moment Chuck wondered if this was just another layer in the sequence of dreams. Awakening in each previous one had felt more real than the one before. Was the pattern repeating itself again? He couldn't help another frantic sweep of the room for the BFG. In each preceding dream the body count had steadily increased. In the first no one had died. In the second just he had died. In the third he and Sarah and Morgan had died. If this turned out to be another one, what would the death total be? And then some geeky corner of his mind wondered what order polynomial equation the curve was following. Or was it exponential or logarithmic?

"Chuck," said his mother in a soothing tone as she once again brushed her cool fingertips across his near feverish brow. "You need to stay calm. My equipment has nearly neutralized the adverse effects of the bad 'flash', but it will help if you stay calm."

And once she mentioned the equipment and brought it to his attention, he realized there was something hard and metallic covering the top of his head. Gingerly, he reached up with his right hand and fingered the device. It was smooth and hard and felt like the helmet Friar Tuck had worn in the original 1930s Robin Hood movie. Well, except for the bundle of wires he could feel extending out through an opening in the top.

"What happened?" he finally asked.

His mother, Mary, didn't immediately respond. Instead she asked, "Are you okay to sit up?"

Slowly Chuck nodded and then used his hands and elbows to lever himself up. Quickly each of the women provided a supportive hand under one of his upper arms.

Once he was sitting up his Mother pulled her hands free and then stretched the right one out in front of him towards Sarah.

"I'm sorry we had to meet under these circumstances. I'm Mary Bartowski."

Sarah took the offered hand. "Sarah Walker. And I'm just glad you called me. So what happened?"

Mary sat back on her haunches and let out a small sigh. "Chuck showed up at the door out of the blue. Of course, I have been keeping tabs on him and Ellie and in particular since Steve's message led him to the secret facility under our old house, but I never expected him to show up here today.

"But since he had managed to track me down, no matter how dangerous knowing my whereabouts is, I couldn't just pretend I didn't recognize him. So I pulled him into a hug and that's when he 'flashed'. And I'm afraid my enemies had loaded what was in effect a computer virus into the Intersect which would only activate when the two of us touched. We were just lucky it happened here, where I had the necessary equipment to counteract the worst of it."

"Counteract the worst of it?" echoed Chuck. "You wouldn't believe the nightmares I have been experiencing. I can't imagine how it could have been worse."

"You could have been trapped in one of those dreams forever or at least until you died," answered his Mother.

"But I did die, at least twice that I remember," Chuck said with a shudder. Just talking about it seemed to make those deaths feel more real.

"Yeah, but each time I was able to use it as the impetus to jump your mind closer to an awakened state."

In his head, Chuck could almost follow her explanation, but it still didn't seem to make his experiences in the dreams any less harrowing.

But he could worry about the details later, it was time to move the conversation on to more important things like the whole reason he had come here. For finally, all of his 'normal' memories seemed to be returning. He could now remember all the details of the months' long quest to find his mother after discovering hints about her life in the plethora of records his father had stashed in the facility Chuck had never known had existed below their original home.

"Mom," he began and for a second his voice started to break like he was suddenly a teenager again. Starting again, he continued. "Mom, why did you leave twenty-five years ago? And why didn't you ever come back?"

Mary realized it was time for some explanations. "It's a long story. Do you feel up to moving over to the couch?"

Chuck simply nodded.

"Okay, I'll need to take the device off your head first," his Mom answered. Then she paused to look at the display of the smartphone connected to the wire bundle exiting the helmet. "The device has been slowly reducing the field strength over the last few minutes, but it hasn't reached zero. So when I shut it off, you may feel some effect."

Chuck nodded and tried to steel himself against what he expected to be a blast of pain. But the effect wasn't anything like that. It was both more subtle and potentially much more dangerous. No, the level of paranoia he was feeling simply jumped up several notches. Of course, paranoia is something that is only obvious to an outside observer. From Chuck's perspective it was a case of the nightmares and their implications surging back to the foreground of his thoughts. And immediately his eyes darted around the room searching for the BFG since he suddenly knew it had to be there. And when he couldn't find it, he turned his attention to the women's eyes. He was certain he could almost see a trace of the red terminator glow peeking through.

"Chuck," his Mother said in almost a brusque tone. "You need to focus. Everything is going to be alright. Do you want to move over to the couch and listen to my story?"

For a moment he thought he caught a hint of a Schwarzeneggerian accent hidden in her words, but then he forced himself to take a deep slow breath. "Yeah, I would like to hear your story."

"Good," said his Mother as she took a firm grip on his arm to help him to his feet.

Briefly a spike of fear raced through him as he imagined her terminator-strong hand crushing his arm until the very bones began to crack. But once again he forced the almost overwhelming fear down and focused his attention on getting to his feet. He swayed for just a moment once he made it erect. Then he gingerly began making his way towards the couch, moving as though he was suddenly eighty years old.

Once they had crossed the intervening fifteen feet, Chuck slid gratefully into the soft, deep cushions as the women arranged themselves one to each side.

His Mom began to tell her story, but Chuck couldn't prevent a large portion of his attention from dwelling on his recent dreams. And in the fragile mental state he was still in, he wondered once again if this was real or just another layer to the nightmares. Even if this was reality and he had truly found his long-lost mother, he knew it was going to be a very long time before he would feel certain and would be able to stop looking for BFGs and terminators around every corner.

The End

Author's Note:

Well, what do you think? Was it an interesting way to work in a little terminator tribute for Linda Hamilton's upcoming addition to the show? I know it was a little darker than most Chuck stories, but it felt appropriate for one involving terminators.

And to me it doesn't feel as polished as most of my other stories, but I set myself a goal of writing and posting one chapter a day and I only had about two hours each to write and proofread. But considering those self-imposed constraints, I think it turned out pretty close to what I was hoping for when I started writing it.

Anyway if you liked it or even hated it, I would love to hear from you,

Duane


End file.
